


yesterday came suddenly

by attheborder



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending, Injury Recovery, M/M, Rescue Camp
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-27
Packaged: 2021-03-14 05:06:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29413116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheborder/pseuds/attheborder
Summary: “A midsummer miracle,” Dr. Rae says now, when he emerges. “He’s awake, and lucid. I ought to tell the Captain right away—”“But he didn’t recognize me,” interrupts Tommy. “Is he blind? Is there something wrong with his eyes?”“Not his eyes,” says Dr. Rae. “No, the problem is deeper, I’m sorry to say.” He taps the side of his head. “The last thing he remembers seems to be receiving his orders to go aboardTerror,three years ago, at Woolwich barracks.”
Relationships: Thomas Armitage/Solomon Tozer
Comments: 10
Kudos: 18
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2020), The Terror Rarepair Week 2021





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> fill for my Terror Bingo square: "Memory Loss"

The first thing he notices is his hair. His head feels heavy, as if he were wearing his shako—but when he lifts his hand to touch it, the only thing he feels is a shaggy, matted mess of hair, longer than he’s ever worn it in his life. 

The second thing he notices is the hunger. He’s starving. So hungry it feels like his whole chest might collapse in on itself—hunger like a wound, leaving him almost gasping at the sheer shock of it.

The third thing he notices is that he’s not alone. At the foot of his bed there’s a chair, and in it, curled up in a painful-looking position, is a man: his head tucked into the crook of his elbow, so all Sol can see is a swirl of dark curls.

Sol sits up, the cot creaking beneath him. The man in the chair jerks awake at the sound: when he lifts his head, Sol sees that he is more of a boy than a man, his youth visible around his eyes and in the fullness of his lips. 

“Oh, Christ,” the boy says, springing up, nearly tripping over himself to come to Sol’s bedside. He sits right down on the cot and, without preamble, wraps Sol in a tight, almost painful embrace. Sol freezes, absolutely blindsided, remains immobile as the boy leans back to look him in the eyes, his whole face going from disbelief to something softer, and then he’s leaning forward, going in as if to _kiss_ him, right on the mouth, so Sol pushes him off with all his might—a little too harshly, or perhaps the boy wasn’t expecting it, because he falls backwards off the cot, right onto his arse on the cold ground, as Sol growls, his throat dry: “What the fuck is wrong with you?” 

The boy blinks, blue eyes wide—stutters out, “Sol—it’s me—”

“Who are you? What is this place?” Sol’s looking around, now, realizing he is not in the barracks—he is not on a ship—he is not anywhere he knows. “Where am I?” He’s looking around for his gun, but he can’t find it—can’t find any of his things—

“I…” stammers the boy, and then scrambles unsteadily to his feet, and stumbles out of the tent, leaving Sol with more questions than answers, and a sense that something is terribly wrong. 

With some difficulty he gets up out of the cot, and, his head spinning, his knees aching, walks to the entrance of the tent. When he looks out, he sees gray rocks stretching to the horizon, and an uncaring sun above. 

***

Tommy waits, tapping his toe on the slate outside the tent, while the doctor attends inside to Sol. 

After Mr. Hickey had taken the rifle-stock to his head he had not woken up: not even when Little’s party arrived to the mutiny camp; not even when shots rang out killing Des Voeux and Le Vesconte in the struggle to subdue Hickey; and not even when, less than a day later, John Rae and his band of Company men came over the rise from the east, and they were saved at last. 

“A midsummer miracle,” Dr. Rae says now, when he emerges. “He’s awake, and lucid. I ought to tell the Captain right away—” 

“But he didn’t recognize me,” interrupts Tommy. “Is he blind? Is there something wrong with his eyes?” 

“Not his eyes,” says Dr. Rae. “No, the problem is deeper, I’m sorry to say.” He taps the side of his head. “The last thing he remembers seems to be receiving his orders to go aboard _Terror_ , three years ago, at Woolwich barracks.” 

Tommy tries to take this in, but it floats atop the surface of his mind like oil, refusing to settle. 

“His memory…? All of it?” 

“It seems so.” 

Dr. Rae turns to go, but Tommy, desperate, grabs him by the shoulder, pleading: “Can’t you do something? Give him—medicine? He needs help, he’s not right, please—” 

“I’m sorry, Mr. Armitage,” says Dr. Rae, politely removing Tommy’s hand. His eyes are very tired, but very kind. “Not right now. There are a great deal of very sick men here in this camp who might not last the night. Your Mr. Tozer—” 

“Sergeant Tozer.” 

“—your _sergeant_ is lucky he’ll be able to walk out of that sick tent, on his own two legs, still knowing how to eat and talk and aim his rifle. Injuries of this kind are unpredictable; not very well understood, even by the most practiced physicians.” 

“When will he remember?”

“It could be tomorrow…. But frankly, it’s just as likely that It could be never. You’re best off leaving him to Dr. Richardson and I.”

His Scotch burr carries the comfortable weight of authority, but Tommy doesn’t trust him. He can’t imagine he gives much of a damn about a man he knows well to have been a key player in the plot against the Captain. He and his fellow doctor might even have cause to neglect Sol purposefully. 

“Is there anything I can do?” 

“You can leave him be, lad.” Dr. Rae is growing visibly annoyed, now, clearly feeling his time is being wasted by this disrespectful boy, bruised and addled and perhaps even ungrateful.

And Tommy has no argument left in him: he is exhausted, all his strength regained this past week through the rescue party’s provisions going towards wishing, endlessly and uselessly, for Sol to wake up. (Useless until it wasn’t—he had thought, for a moment, that his prayers had been answered—but only in part, only in terrible and vicious part.) 

He lets Rae walk away in the direction of command, where he presumably will inform Crozier of Sol’s state, and the Captain will do whatever he deems to be wisest with that knowledge. He lingers then outside Sol’s tent, paralyzed with a sick fear, his overgrown hair blowing in the chilly summer breeze. 

If Mr. Goodsir were here, he would surely know how to help—

—but Mr. Goodsir is dead, and Tommy has eaten of his flesh, and he has done other things he cannot undo, crimes he committed for the chance to survive, and for the love of a good man. 

Crozier forgave him, welcomed him back into the fold, but it is not Crozier’s forgiveness he ever cared about. He doesn’t care about the Captain, even now, not one bit. Not after he kept secrets when he shouldn’t have, not after he would’ve hanged Sol without a second thought for only doing what was right. 

It’s Sol he cares about. Sol who he would make proud with the last breath in his body—Sol for whose sake he tried to start a second mutiny, so that they might both live to feel the warmth of the English sun again, perhaps even together.

And now, thinking about the look on Sol’s face when he leaned in close—the total lack of recognition, the deep blankness, the absence of even the most obscured layers of affection he’s come to be able to recognize, easy as reading—it twists his gut up worse than hunger ever did, worse than Goodsir’s poison. 

***

The Captain comes in and talks to him, after he’s eaten. At least, he says he’s the Captain, and he well carries himself like one, so Sol believes him easy enough on that count. He asks him the same damn questions the doctor had asked—how do you feel, what do you remember—with some other odd questions too: does the name “Hickey” mean anything to you? (No.) What about the word “Carnivale?” (No.) 

He has his own questions for the Captain. So many of them he cannot find the right way to say, without sounding weak or stupid: Where are _Terror_ and _Erebus?_ Why are they encamped out here on this rocky waste, why are there so many sick men? Where is Sir John Franklin, the great man who was to lead them through the Passage; why is this Crozier here in his stead? Sol had been the envy of his barrack when he received the posting; he had looked forward to serving under such a decorated explorer. Glory, he’d been promised; freezing his arse off, he’d expected; but nobody had said anything about deserting the ships, nor being pawed and petted by rough Scottish doctors wearing fur caps. 

So instead he asks, “What’s the name of the boy who was in here, earlier?” 

“The boy…?” 

“Dark hair. Light blue eyes….” Sol feels very stupid, suddenly. That’s probably half the damn crew. But as clear as the face is in his mind, he cannot find a better way to describe him. As if the turns of phrase he might use had vanished along with the last three years. 

“Could it be… no, he’s still abed… Mr. Armitage, perhaps?” 

Armitage. The name stirs nothing in him; there’s no way to know if the Captain is correct. He turns the syllables over in his mind, tries them out on his tongue. There they sit, dry and uncomfortable. 

The Captain reminds Sol to follow the doctor’s orders closely, which, as he recalls, means to stay in his cot, inside the tent with the strange white light filtering in through the flaps of canvas with hardly any variation for time of day. Easy enough for Sol to nod and say “Yes, sir,” and fall back onto his thin pillow, stare up at the dust swirling in cold shafts of sun, hurling himself against the black spot in his memory until his head begins to pound and ache, and he drifts off into an uneasy, discomfited doze. 

A kind-looking steward with thick brows and silver hair brings him a tray of food—strange meat, raw and red on its metal plate. Sol is hungry enough to force it down, and then even ask for more, but the steward sadly informs him that they have no more to spare, even with the hunting parties going out each morning.

After that, Doctors Beard and No-Beard, as Sol’s come to think of the authoritative pair, are in and out of his tent every day—checking his vitals with a perfunctory air, examining his gums and his eyes, admonishing him to eat more of the meat, drink more of the lemon juice that they or the steward bring in at irregular hours. 

He’s got no duties; no drills; no gun. He doesn’t even have his red uniform jacket—doesn’t know where it went, and nobody can tell him. He finds a worn navy coat with pewter buttons at the foot of his cot one morning and shrugs it on; it’s too big around the waist and too tight around the shoulders. 

After much pleading, and after the headaches have mostly gone, he is given leave to begin daily walks. “Don’t overexert yourself,” says Dr. No-Beard (Richardson, his name might be), as he leaves Sol’s side in a hurry, off to confer with the Captain, or to attend to other sicker men.

For some reason Sol is expected to be accompanied by someone: a doctor, or a guard, or a steward. But nobody can be spared, to make sure he doesn’t trip or fall or faint as he makes his shaky way down the lane of the makeshift camp. 

As he struggles along, legs threatening to give way beneath him from disuse, he sees the other men staring at him—seamen, officers, and even a paltry scattering of Marines, their crossbands ragged and stained, doing guard duty outside the command tent and the armory. None raise their hand to him in greeting; none hail him by name; certainly no one nods or salutes or tips their cap. 

Even the fur-coated Company voyageurs, rangy and tanned and weather-beaten, give him a wide berth, avoiding him in the slate alleys of the camp as if he were some kind of common criminal, instead of merely yet another pathetic staggering invalid. It makes him bristle with indignity. What is it he’s supposed to have done, then? There’s no respect to be found, is there—what’s gotten into them all? 

On the one hand, it wouldn’t be hard to ask. On the other, he fears what they might say. Because how would he know a lie from the truth? 

Though every day he grows stronger physically, the steadiness of his mind seems only to fall further away. He is a Sergeant of the Royal Marines, assigned on a prestigious voyage of discovery—he knows this, if he knows anything, and yet it is hardly real, because he has no men to command, and they don’t seem to be discovering anything other than new ways to die.

The doctors’ visits grow less frequent. They and the Captain are always busy, rushing from one place to the next—they bury a man every other day, it seems, and the rest of the time they are planning hunting parties, writing in their logbooks, mapping out routes. 

And the boy has not visited again. When Sol tries to think on that strange moment, just after waking, he cannot divine any meaning from it. It falls apart when he tries to look at it, a frustrating, flickering fata morgana. 

He feels like a ghost. He isn’t used to being alone like this. Even during his most dismal blockade service, under the thumb of a cruel captain, overseeing the most undisciplined and unfriendly of crews, he always had his own men to mess with, to laugh and grouse with, to sit mending with. To watch approvingly as they drilled, practiced gunnery, went through the motions of sentry duty, welcoming officers aboard, escorting men to and from other ships. 

Could it be that this is Hell? He’s done nothing to warrant being sentenced so, not to his knowledge. Here in this desolate afterlife, the hollow faces of the half-starved crew all blur together into one unfortunate mass. There’s no mirror in his tent but Sol can only imagine he looks as ragged as he feels, as ragged as the rest of them. 

And among them all, the only familiar one is Armitage. If that is his name. Like a wrong-colored shingle on a rooftop, like a graceful bird breaking the oppressive smooth sphere of the bright sky. 

Sol sees him, despite himself, without trying: there is not much else to see.

It is a blue-gray morning, fog blowing across the shale like the breath of something as large as the sky, when he comes across the boy carrying an empty paill away from the dug-out privies on the far side of the camp, back towards the officers’ tents. 

“Listen,” he says, stopping Armitage in his tracks. “I need you to tell me.” 

“Tell you what?” 

“Everything. What happened. To the expedition, to me.” 

“Ask the Captain,” says Armitage, not meeting Sol’s eyes. He shifts from foot to foot, seemingly eager to get away. 

“He’s busy,” says Sol. He puts a forceful hand to Armitage’s shoulder, to stop him from leaving. “You were there, weren’t you? C’mon. I’m sick of this, I’m done not knowing, it’s not my fault I woke up with it all gone—”

They’re hidden behind a supply shed now, with no one around to see, but Armitage is looking about them, eyes darting with a prey-like fear that sparks involuntary pity in Sol. He’s not gonna _hurt_ him, is he? He lets his hand fall; folds it together with his other one, fingers interlaced, twisting together.

Seeing the coast is clear, Armitage makes an aborted move towards Sol, but then seems to remember what happened last time. He subsides somewhat, setting down his bucket with a soft crunch on the stone, then shoving his hands in his pockets.

And he tells Sol—in hushed halting phrases, workmanlike sentences that tumble out one after another from his mouth, each one more and more unlikely: The bear-that-wasn’t-a-bear. Sir John Franklin, dead on the ice. The Lady Silence. Carnivale. The walk out… and the mutiny. 

Sol’s head begins to hurt again, like it hasn’t in days now. It’s impossible—all of it, but especially the mutiny. He’s a bloody Royal Marine. He is trained and paid and sworn to defend command from such uprisings—what else is he for, then? Armitage has got to be lying, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. 

“And you?” he says to Armitage, to avoid thinking more on it. “Why the hell would _you_ go along with a thing like that? You seem smarter than that. You don’t seem like a fool.” 

Armitage sets his jaw, chews at his full lower lip. From underneath dark lashes his eyes flick up to meet Sol’s for just a moment before falling to the rocks underfoot. 

“Cos of you,” he says.

“Me?” 

“Yeah. You and I,” he says, “We…. We were friends.” He takes a deep breath; his gaze lifts again and this time falls steady at Sol. “More than.”

“What do you mean?” 

“Our first winter, you taught me to shoot. Really shoot, I mean, not just pull the trigger, but find the angle, time it right…” 

Sol, his arms crossed in front of his chest, taps impatiently on the worn elbows of his borrowed coat, something sticky and uncomfortable rising in his chest at the way this conversation is turning.

“You let me mess with the Marines, that second winter—treated me like one of your own. You’d come to my berth—show me how to roll cigarettes—I never used to smoke, didn’t have any of my own, so you’d give me yours, not in exchange for anything. Just for me to have. And the third winter…” 

He trails off. He’s staring so intently past Sol now that Sol turns around to see if there’s something or someone behind them: but it’s only the same gray hills and dull sky as it ever is.

“The third winter?” he prompts. 

“We were lovers,” whispers Armitage. 

Sol takes a step back, as if he’s been pushed. Feels like it—like a hard shove to his chest, though Armitage’s hands are still balled up in his pockets. Angrily, Sol says, blustering, “I’m not that sort. Do I look like that sort to you? Watch who you’re calling a—” 

“You wanted it. You wanted me.” He bites it out as though it’s choking him, his voice breaking with a pathetic sort of sound. “Christ, Sol, I’m—I’m not lying.” 

Armitage’s gaze is back to him, searching now, penetrating, almost surgical, as if seeking something inside Sol, and in defense Sol draws his arms tighter around himself, as if he could prevent the boy from seeing the bruised and howling void inside where his memory used to be, still raw around the edges. 

“You expect me to believe that?” Sol says harshly, looking the boy up and down. Same height as him—seven, eight years younger, maybe—strong-shouldered, heavy-browed, with that certain paleness to his bare cheeks, indicating his first shave in a long while. His hair is unkempt, curls spiraling out from a cowlick, and his knuckles are crusted over with red scabs. He carries the same sunken sallowness that characterizes all of the expedition men in this camp, evidence of those hard times that Sol can’t recall. It doesn’t suit him—doesn’t suit any of them. 

Something threatens to stir in Sol, an urge he’s not felt since London. The way he got around his men, sometimes, when one of them showed up hurt or broke or done wrong: to fix it, and then to fight whoever caused it. A powerful mix of protective pity and righteous rage—but he bats it away, bidding it gone. It’s not the time. 

“I _know_ you,” says Armitage, insistent. “I know you grew up in Liverpool but your mum was from Axbridge. I know you served on the _Prince Regent_ and fought at Bilbao—” 

“You could have heard that anywhere,” Sol interrupts. “From anyone. We’ve been on the same ship three years, haven’t we?” 

Armitage’s mouth opens and closes a few times. In this light his eyes are almost clear, blanched as new ice. At last he says, “It’s the truth,” with a desperation that nearly disgusts Sol with its nakedness and need. God’s wounds, mutiny is one thing, but mutiny and sodomy? He’d be thrice-damned before he’d risk any of it, let alone all of it. It just doesn’t make sense—every rational part of his mind rejects it. “Sol, it’s the truth, if you’ll just try and remember—if you’ll just let me—” 

He reaches for Sol, but Sol steps back, shaking his head. “Just—stay away from me, will you?” And this time it’s Sol who leaves, shoulders hunched as he shambles away back towards his tent, trying to make his thoughts go as blank as the sky. 


	2. Chapter 2

It’s odd, having a job again. It feels ridiculous at times: pouring tea, cleaning plates, washing linens, as if he were back aboard _Terror_ , serving the raucous officers of the gunroom (all dead now, he can’t help but think).

Perhaps the oddest thing is doing it alone. Gibson and Genge are dead; Jopson, once he’s back on his feet, will resume his duties as third lieutenant. There’s Bridgens, but he spends his days assisting the doctors with the sick—Hoar among them, thanks to a wound he sustained during the fight at the mutiny camp.

So it’s just Tommy here, repairing Dr. Rae’s apron, pushing through stitch after stitch with half-numb fingers that haven’t been truly warm in months.

He wishes, absurdly, that he had a sledge to pull: at least under Mr. Hickey’s purview, his joints aching and his lips cracked dry, there was a sense that they were going somewhere, _towards_ something.

But they can’t move on from this camp until there are fewer men in the sick tent. The cases of scurvy are still in the depth of their recovery, and the voyageurs are struggling to find enough game to keep them off the tins.

Tommy even dreams fondly of being given responsibility over the armory again—a job he had not signed up to do on the expedition, but one that had been thrust upon him without ceremony, just a few months out from Greenhithe, when Mr. Carr was invalided home on the supply ship. He’d come to prefer it vastly over his other duties: had come to treasure scratching out every cramped entry on the log, had enjoyed overhearing the drills being conducted on the deck above, knowing it was his oiled triggers the Marines were pulling.

Of course, nobody would dare let him near the guns now. He forfeited that privilege when he followed Mr. Hickey out into the fog. He misses the routine of disassembly; the smell of the grease and the spent powder as he cleaned; the satisfying click and slide of the parts into and against each other.

It was in the armory that he’d first spoken to Sol. A real conversation, mind, not just _yes, sir_ in passing or _pardon me, sir_ as he moved past him in the galley.

Sergeant Tozer had showed up in a panic around four bells in the afternoon watch that day. He’d fallen and broken the stock of the Captain’s gun, not two hours since being sent out to look for specimens on the shore of Disco Bay—an innocent enough accident, though that wasn’t how the Captain took it.

The dutiful, disciplined sergeant of the past few months was gone; replaced by a man who tapped his fingers impatiently against the table, sloping shoulders hunched in anger, recounting the reprimand from the Captain. “Thinks I’m some kind of clumsy brute,” Tozer had gritted out, “calling me out in front of everyone for it, not my fault this place is out to get me, that mud on shore is a bloody death trap, he’d know if he ever stuck his boots in it himself…”

Tommy had done his best to cheer him up as he worked on the gun, despite the blood pounding in his bad ear at the sudden nearness of this well-formed soldier, the solid warmth radiating from him even as he fretted. He’d thought something was wrong with him at how weak Tozer was suddenly making him go, thought he was finally being sent round the bend by combination of the high latitudes, the strangeness of the light, the fumes of the monstrous engine shoved into the hold nearby like a caged animal.

To keep himself from swooning, Tommy chattered on about nothing at all while he worked. He had a stock of interesting stories from his mates in the merchant service, plus his own tales of the _Gannett’_ s travels—easy enough to pick out a few of the more interesting ones and tell them in his plainspoken manner.

He’d gotten a bit carried away—had worried he might’ve been bothering the sergeant—but then he’d handed the gun back, good as new, and been looked back at with a keen approval that stirred in him an excess of confidence. “Dunno why the Captain thinks he can hand it to you like that. Without you and your men, he’d be done for,” Tommy had said. A dangerous thing to say—but it had just slipped out, damn his fool mouth—and he’d tensed up, waiting to be cuffed, but the blow never came.

“You’re alright, Mr. Armitage,” said Tozer, with a smile, and gave Tommy a solid clap on the shoulder before hefting the repaired pistol in his solid hands and disappearing out the armory door.

And now—Tommy doesn’t notice that he’s pricked himself until the blood has welled up, staining Rae’s apron with a small but ugly scarlet splotch. He sticks his finger in his mouth and sucks hard, tasting the bitter iron and remembering when, not too long ago, that taste had suffused his entire mouth, his own blood oozing from his gums—keeping his mouth shut, even when there was so much he wanted to say, lest Sol see.

There is no way for the conditions to be met again. _Terror’_ s armory is gone—the ship surely sunken by now, nipped by the ice and settled on the cold seafloor—and Tommy is no longer the bright-eyed and eager boy he was before they’d crossed Baffin Bay and lost sight of home forever. No color in his cheeks, and he's all out of stories. Sol won’t fall for him now. Not like this.

Tommy swallows, hard, bites down, putting pressure on the wound, but his eyes start to burn all the same. He shouldn’t have said a damn thing, he knows it. But Sol had _asked…_

Perhaps it’s for the best that Sol won’t let him come near. If he can make it all the way to Fort Resolution without having to speak to him again, without ever standing close enough to catch the hot salt scent of him drifting over—then perhaps he might finally make himself understand that the man he knew is gone.

***

Sol isn’t meant to hear. He’s on another of his rambles around the camp, because there’s fuck-all else to do, except lay on his cot and try to picture, with difficulty, the faces of men he once knew.

He’s being punished for something he didn’t even do. He’s lost his uniform, lost his gun, been left out to dry by a skeleton of a command, all on account of something another man with his face and his name thought was a clever idea.

The command tent is sagging open, so that from where he stands he can see a sliver of the scene inside, lit by an oil-lamp on the mahogany table across which maps and navigational tools are scattered.

One of the lieutenants—Sol can’t bloody tell anyone apart, not with all the markers of dignified rank having seemingly been lost somewhere out on the ice—is speaking in an almost frantic tone, leaning forward towards the Captain across the table, gesticulating intently.

Acting on instinct, Sol quickly moves out of view, and around to the side, where he can hear the conversation drifting over on the dry wind.

“But how can you be sure he’s not faking?” says the lieutenant.

“Faking?” repeats the Captain.

“To avoid the court martial. It’s the perfect excuse, isn’t it? Hit on the head, doesn’t remember a damn thing, how very convenient. And it’s worked. We all believe him harmless now. How do you know this wasn’t part of some larger plan? A back-up, in case what happened did eventually come to pass.”

“Edward, the doctors have assured me—”

“Sir, with all due respect, neither Richardson and Rae were here,” says the lieutenant—Edward. Sol feels odd knowing the man’s Christian name, and not his surname. “They don’t know what these men are capable of, they see them only as being in need of rescue and care. Because you’ve chosen to keep from them in the dark regarding the details of the mutiny, they don’t understand the gravity of the situation, what’s at stake—”

“Sergeant Tozer is not a liar,” says the Captain, kindly, insistently, as if speaking to an impetuous child. “Trust me. I would know, if he were trying to gull us. The injury that befell him—I saw it happen, I believe the doctors when they tell me of its effects, as you ought to as well.”

“But Mr. Hickey—”

“Isn’t going anywhere, you can be sure of that. The longer he’s kept away from his former men, the more his hold on them will lessen. He’s had no contact with any of them for over a week now…”

 _Mr. Hickey._ That name. He hasn’t heard it since that first day, waking up, the Captain asking in passing…

Nobody marks Sol as he makes his way through the camp, towards a tent that he’s passed a thousand times, one he’d long assumed to be a munitions store of some kind, thanks to the armed man often posted outside as guard. But now he thinks he knows better.

There is so little order here, in this vague approximation of shipboard routine, that not even the watches turn over with any semblance of discipline. When the bell strikes once for the start of the afternoon watch, the Marine—Sol thinks he’s a Marine, perhaps it’s in the way he holds himself, but he’s got no cap and no crossband, just a rifle, so Sol might well be wrong—guarding it yawns, and rubs his stomach, looking out towards the central mess area of the camp, where the voyageurs’ latest hunting successes are roasting on the cookstoves.

There doesn’t seem to be anyone coming to relieve him, but he doesn’t care: he sets off for the mess at a trot, leaving his post unfilled, and Sol waits only a few seconds before slipping inside.

Inside the tent, there is a man. He’s clapped in irons, shackled to the central support of the canvas. No cot to be seen, just a thin bedroll on the ground, next to which lie a chamberpot and an empty metal bowl, the dried remains of some long-ago meal crusted around its rim.

Are they trying to starve him? Freeze him? Or is it the same accidental neglect afforded to Sol himself, by virtue of the sheer sorry chaos of the camp?

“Solomon,” the prisoner says, his face breaking into a delighted grin. “Did you bring tobacco? I’m dying for a smoke. They won’t let me have anything, hardly. It’s brutal.”

Sol says nothing, standing motionless, gazing down at the prisoner, who stares back, a look of realization slowly dawning on his thin foxlike face.

“So it’s true,” the prisoner says—the prisoner who must be Mr. Hickey. He rearranges himself, placing his manacled hands in his lap almost primly, leaning back against the splintered crate that is his only furniture. “You don’t remember.”

Sol grunts, a wordless neutral noise of acknowledgement, neither an affirmation or a denial.

He’s putting it all together now: the missing piece of Armitage’s story. The hole at the center of it.

If he’d been asked, before now, to picture a man who’d threatened the entire expedition, shaken it to its very core and nearly caused its complete failure, he would have pictured someone tall, dark-haired, broad and muscled—the very match for the Captain’s strong-shouldered ease of command. Someone larger than life.

But instead the man Sol has found here is a wizened little creature, pale and sinewy, like a forgotten toy, or a chicken-bone thrown down to the dogs, all the meat long-eaten. A man wasting away—the only part of him that seems truly alive are his eyes: like chips of ice, a bright undying intelligence sparking there, giving off their own cold heat.

“They think they’ll be hanging me, when we get back to England,” he says, as if remarking on the weather.

“And you disagree?”

Hickey only smiles. A ruthless little quirk of the mouth that soars with unerring aim towards Sol but fails to find purchase: he is unmoved, not even to pity. It only seems to rebound back on Hickey, settle like a thorny mantle that makes him twitch and squirm, slightly discomfited.

“You’re planning to escape again,” Sol says.

“Not planning anything,” says Hickey. “But I’ll be free, soon enough. I know it.”

Hickey’s confidence is off-putting, almost intoxicating. The precise opposite of the lethargy that characterizes near everyone else in the camp, excepting maybe the doctors. It scares Sol and excites him in equal measure.

“Did you come here to ask me something in particular, Solomon, or just to keep me company? Or maybe…” He lifts his bound wrists, expectantly.

“I won’t help you,” Sol says. He’s not stupid. It’s the right thing to say.

“Cause you were told, were you? Someone must have had to spell it all out for you. I wonder who. Crozier….? No. Someone else.”

“It was Armitage,” says Sol. He regrets it almost immediately: but somehow just being in this tent has loosened his tongue, as much so as if he’d been drinking.

“And what manner of story did he tell you? In what light did he cast me?”

Sol says nothing. But it seems his silence tells as much as words would do, because Hickey twitches in amusement, shaking his head from side to side and baring his overlarge teeth in another smile. “I see,” he says.

Sol rubs the back of his hand over his brows and then sighs. “He said we were… together. Christ, he said we were lovers. Expected me to believe it.”

Hickey’s face freezes for a moment, something unreadable passing there, before settling into a calm and satisfied look, like a cat who’d got the cream. “Did he? Did he say that? Oh, he’s seen his chance now, hasn’t he. The little minx. He was always panting after you like a puppy. Pathetic, really. Of course, he’s lying... You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” says Sol. “Absolutely. Right.”

“Useful, though. Not exactly the brightest lucifer in the box, but pulled his weight all the same. A terrific shot, though that was all your doing, as I recall. ”

“Right,” Sol says again.

“I mean, why the hell would anyone _want_ to be a Marine? No offense, Solomon. But it was only the sort of thing he would say to justify tagging along with your lot. Sniffing your smallclothes when you tossed them aside, that sort of thing.” He shakes his head in dismay, but it seems very much like this is the most fun he’s had in weeks. No company, no conversation, no comfort. “You can see what he’s trying to do, can’t you? Taking advantage of you in your vulnerable state. I’m impressed. He never used to be this canny, not that I can recall. Suppose it’s my good influence, rubbed off.”

“What should I do?” The question’s off Sol’s tongue before he can stop it. He wants to be given instructions—he wants a sensible way forward, he’ll do anything to hear it.

“Stay away. Don’t let him get into your head,” says Hickey. “You’re in a fragile state, after all—it can be easily disturbed. You’re lucky you came to me, Solomon. No—not lucky. Smart. You always knew when to throw it in, when to admit you needed leading.” He flexes his shoulders, arms straining against his chains before relaxing again. “Come back and see me sometime, and we can discuss this further.”

Shouldering back out of the tent, well on his way by the time the new guard arrives to take up his post outside, Sol knows he ought to feel satisfied. Armitage was lying, hiding Hickey’s involvement; the ploy to get him to go along with his little seduction scheme was part and parcel with the falsehood.

But...

Hickey had mentioned that Sol taught Armitage to shoot. And that’s what Armitage had said, hadn’t he? So it wasn’t _all_ untrue.

Sol's headache returns, as he goes over it, again and again; he lies down on his cot, curls up, and waits for the pain to go away.

***

There’s a bite of cold in the air when Tommy awakes that wasn’t there the day before. The sun is starting to sink lower in the sky every night—soon it will set completely. He thinks back to the last time he saw the stars. Had it been before Billy Gibson died, or after?

He’s sharing a tent with some of the other men, now—none of whom could help him recall, since all the former mutineers have been carefully distributed between the sick tent and elsewhere, in order to both integrate them back with the men and also insulate them from each other, else another mutiny foment.

An almost laughably pointless decision on Crozier’s part, given that without Hickey’s guiding hand, and with Sol so reduced, there’s almost no possibility any of the remaining rebels to do so much as share a common complaint, let alone raise arms against the kind doctors who’ve done more for them since arriving than the Captain ever did. Crozier’s leadership during this stage of their endless walk is as weak as it ever was, his authority at this point only a matter of blind luck and lack of alternatives, in Tommy’s mind.

Tommy spares no more thought than he has to towards command; especially not now, when his old friend Henry Peglar, newly discharged from his sick bed after a long and at times seemingly doomed convalescence, has joined Tommy here, setting up his bedroll and placing his notebook and pencil for safekeeping underneath it.

Right now he’s staring at his hair in the tiny tin mirror that is the tent’s only concession to vanity, wearing an embarrassed look. “Bit ridiculous, isn’t it,” he says. “Almost long enough to tie back. Like my grandfather used to wear it.”

“I could cut it,” Tommy says slowly, “if you like. I’ve nothing on until the officers’ meeting at six bells.”

“Oh—could you?”

It feels like the most natural thing in the world, as if he and Henry were back sitting side-by-side in _Terror’s_ warm fo’c’sle, a storm blowing on the upper decks as the fiddle played and men all around them keeping busy best they can.

The officers, he couldn’t care less about. The Captain and the doctors only so far as they can help him stay alive, long enough to get home. But if he can find his way back into the good graces of the men, just like this—through small kindnesses, and quiet friendship—perhaps he won’t need Sol as much, the way he does now, a terrible dying thirst that he can’t shake.

When Tommy is finished, brushing Henry’s newly-shorn locks back with his comb, he finds he’s proud of his work: it frames the returned flush on Henry’s healthy cheeks, makes him look his age again, young and fresh and alive.

“Go on, show Mr. Bridgens,” Tommy says, with an encouraging nod. Henry gives him a grateful, knowing look, and ducks out, heading towards the medical tent where Mr. Bridgens keeps careful track of the camp’s store of powders and pastes.

Tommy is cleaning the shears when he hears the tent-flap rustle. “Yeah?” he says, turning and expecting to find one of his other tent-mates, or perhaps Lieutenant Little to drag him off to some useless duty—the man seems to take a perverse pleasure in assigning him tasks, which he supposes is justified, after the injury he did him. Since Sol’s awakening, he’s more than once bitterly wished his own blow to Little’s head had spilled all his memories out as well. (That would be too much justice for this unfair land, he knows.)

But instead of Little, he sees the unmistakeable silhouette of Sol, taking up the space at the entrance that Henry has just vacated.

“You a barber too?” he asks. His voice so terribly familiar, its tone so light and easy, that Tommy expects him to walk over and smooth a broad hand over Tommy’s shoulder, or lean in and knock their foreheads together, but he just stands there, arms crossed, shifting from foot to foot.

“Just helping a friend,” says Tommy shortly. It’s as if he’s being haunted—but worse than any ghost, though, because Sol is real and solid and Tommy could hold him, if he’d let him, but he won’t, no matter how much Tommy might wish it.

Sol scratches at his head, drags his fingers through his own long, unkempt hair. “Need to do something about this, is all.”

“I could wash it for you,” Tommy says. “Comb it and plait it back, like how some of the Company men wear it.” He stops himself just short of adding, _I think it’d suit you,_ swallows the thought down, lets it sit heavy in his chest.

But Sol is insistent. “No—no, cut it all off. Short as you can. I need it gone, don’t be precious about it. Hurts my head, all heavy like this.”

So Tommy does. Sol sits; Tommy leans down and begins to shear away at his dirty-blonde locks, trying not to be so bloody sentimental about it as he cuts closer and closer to the scalp. Those last days, when they’d all felt more like skeletons than men, when they were too hungry to do anything other than rest and haul and scout and eat—Tommy would think of what they’d do when they got back to the ships at last, like Sol promised they would—how once safely back in Tommy’s berth he’d clutch at Sol’s grown-out hair, twining his fingers through it, tugging on it as Sol licked a stripe up his chest, teeth playing at his nipples, sucking bruises at his neck… He’d fall asleep like that, maybe, laying on top of Tommy, his breath even and slow.

They don’t speak, now, as Tommy cuts; there’s only the sound of the wind whistling through the tent flaps, low talk from the men outside, the occasional overly jubilant shout of French from one of the voyageurs.

He realizes only after he’s begun that he’s not asked Sol if he wants his beard trimmed too: surely that’s something he could do on his own, if he were so inclined. But Sol makes no move to stop him as he comes around to the front, leans over and begins to snip at the overgrown hair there, until the planes of Sol’s face start to come back into focus, his handsome features resolving as if being set down stroke by stroke, a scene on canvas.

This close, Tommy can’t help but breathe it in: underneath the dirt and last fading sour remains of sickness there’s the warm human scent of him, familiar and sweet.

Eventually he sets down the shears and hands the mirror to Sol, lets him check his handiwork over. Freed of the overgrowth and then some—his hair shorter now than Tommy’s ever seen it, his beard pared heavily down to neatness— his broad neck is fully exposed, the hard line of his jaw where it meets his ears clearly visible. The shape of his head—some might call it ungainly, overlarge, but Tommy can’t help find it lovely: his ears, too, sticking out as they do almost like a child’s. A strong face, yet lovely—and in his deep-set eyes there’s a look of steady calm.

Without his red coat, without the weight of the last three years on him, he does look altogether strange to Tommy: he looks like a stranger. Tommy’s heart gives a desperate little lurch, looking down at what he’s done. But it’s right, maybe, him a new man on the outside as well as in. Taking him further away from the terrible things they did, from all the horrors and the dark.

“You don’t have to lie, you know,” Sol says, handing the mirror back.

“Sorry?”

“That story you spun. About—” He gestures between them, ever so casually.

To this, Tommy has nothing to say, even as Sol stands, dusts the front of his borrowed coat free of scattered hair. It seems useless to repeat himself again, tell Sol he didn’t lie. If Sol needs to believe that he did, then he’ll let him.

It seems for a moment like he might stay—might sit down with a grunt on Tommy’s cot, prop his legs up, dig a cigarette out of his pocket and offer it over—but after a moment he gives Tommy a short nod and, without saying anything else, exits the tent, leaving Tommy alone again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bridgens and peglar are alive BECAUSE I SAY SO

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [tumblr](http://areyougonnabe.tumblr.com) and [twitter!](http://twitter.com/areyougonnabe)


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